Stephen Walt writes about the dominance of failed “experts” in US foreign policy circles (with bold added by me)
[M]ost of the U.S. foreign policy establishment performed abysmally during the run-up to the war. Top officials in the Bush administration told several important lies to bolster the case for war, such as the claim that there was no doubt Iraq had WMD – indeed, they said they knew where they were – -and the charge that Saddam was in cahoots with Al Qaeda.
The majority of prominent Democrats and plenty of card-carrying liberals backed the war as well. Indeed, almost all of the top foreign policy officials in Obama’s first term were vocal supporters of the invasion, with the president himself being a notable exception. Denizens of the usual Washington think-tanks – including supposedly “moderate” organizations like Brookings and bipartisan organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations – were also filled with pro-war cheerleaders. The same was true of the New York Times and Washington Post, whose editors and reporters swallowed the Bush team’s sales pitch hook, line, and sinker. All in all, the decision to invade was taken with a degree of carelessness and callowness unworthy of any country with pretensions to global leadership. And one should never forget that this reckless decision cost more than $1 trillion and led to thousands of American battlefield casualties and many ruined lives. Of course, the Iraqi people have suffered even more over the past decade.
[…]
But not everyone thought invading Iraq was a good idea. In September 2002, thirty-three senior scholars who specialize in security affairs published a quarter-page ad on the New York Times op-ed page, declaring, “War with Iraq is Not in America’s National Interest." You can read the original ad here.
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It is worth noting that none of the signatories on this list has held a government position since then, and my guess is that none is likely to do so in the future.
Read the article for the list. You will find few of the people who were right about Iraq are joining the "DO SOMETHING” and “WE LOOK WEAK” hyperventilation about Ukraine. Why is that? It’s because those people are not part of the self congratulating, no penalty for failure, foreign policy “expert” group that has been most successful in protecting their status despite a track record of always getting it wrong at the cost of someone else’s blood.
krebscycle 
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